[Fedora-livecd-list] Trimming the size of LiveCD's

Douglas McClendon dmc.fedora at filteredperception.org
Fri Aug 31 14:33:09 UTC 2007


Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 10:24 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
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>> Here's a thought:
>>
>> 1304 random packages will install 724 MB of data in /usr/share/doc
>>
>> I'm sure there is /something/ to gain here. If every package on average
>> installs ~0.5 MB of docs... Would it worth figuring out what docs should
>> be on the LiveCD in the first place? I guess removing everything RPM
>> calls docs is too much, as this will include man-pages as well.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>>
> 
> As long as you are willing to ignore the rpm verification issue that
> gets raised every time this is mentioned (or go with Douglas'
> fixup-script approach), 


Also, it occurred to me that the more complete solution to the rpm 
verification issue would be to have a (signed?) list of files that are 
expected to be missing.  Then with either a wrapper, or a minor mod to 
rpm, you could have just as complete verification.

Then, the solution to the inefficient fixup problem (downloading whole 
rpms just to get the small missing files), if one were serious about it, 
you could obviously for every shipped livecd, create a single signed 
package of just the missing files.


dropping language support is certainly going to
> give you just as much if not more space savings. 
> 
> I recently added %lang tags to most of the big gnome help documents
> documents in /usr/share/gnome/help. Also, dropping CJK fonts easily
> saves some 40M.

Yup, languages and fonts I can't read gets me emacs, thunderbird, and 
openoffice :)

Then of course there is the good ol SELinux...  For those multitude of 
situations when the cost benefit equation suggests forgoing the ~7% 
performance and ~7% cdrom space hit.  (though I truly welcome any 
verbose response explaining lots of examples of how SELinux protects me 
when I'm just web browsing from a desktop with no exposed ports/services)

-dmc




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